


the third option

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Character Death Fix, Cousy Fix It, F/M, Fix-It, GH-325, Late Night Conversations, Love Confessions, POV Phil Coulson, Post Season 5, Pre-Relationship, Touching, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-16
Updated: 2018-10-16
Packaged: 2019-08-03 01:07:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16316204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: Coulson and Daisy discuss the ramifications of Daisy saving his life.Written for the Cousy Fix-It event at johnsonandcoulson.com - Prompt: quantum entanglement





	the third option

Her presence in the common room doesn’t take him by surprise, and Coulson wonders if this new awareness of her is due to the operation, or if he’s imagining things already, or a third option he hasn’t considered.

She moves in the darkness, heavily, and by the time Coulson walks to her from the kitchen she’s already sitting on the couch. Her face still looks so tired, almost sleepy.

“You shouldn’t be out of your bed.”

She lifts her head, pausing to look at Coulson for a moment. She doesn’t look surprised or startled by his presence either.

“Neither should you,” Daisy points out, throwing a glance at the bit of medical tape still attached to Coulson’s arm.

He shakes his head and removes it, rubbing the still-sore spot on his vein.

He walks to her but, for some reason, instead of sitting by her side he decides to sit on the sturdy coffee table in front of her, so that they are facing each other. He hands her one of the beers he has just taken out from the fridge when he heard her approach. Daisy mutters thanks, her mouth drawing the words in the dark.

“I’m fine,” Coulson says. “I wasn’t the one who lost a lot of blood.”

“I didn’t lose it,” Daisy replies, with a very serious look on her face, almost angry, like the word has offended her.

“You know what I mean,” he defends himself.

He can’t get the image out of his head: Daisy besides him on the operating table, the blood slowly but incessantly pumped out of her body. Coulson knows she will be good as new with some rest and some food but the memory of it, it looked like a kind of twisted sacrifice.

“Wondering if I’m having second thoughts?” Daisy asks.

Ever since they first met Coulson has wondered if the young woman had some kind of special insight, almost like she could read his mind at times. Now he’s even more uncertain that’s not the case - it could be one of the side effect of this whole thing.

He shifts nervously.

“It crossed my mind to ask you, yes,” he admits.

“Why I would I?” she answers the question herself, her gaze not quite on Coulson’s face. “It was just a blood transfusion.”

There is a part of it that feels unfair, or at least ironic. They tried so many potential cures, so many solutions. And it was as simple as Daisy’s blood. As simple as the thing that saved him in the first place: the GH-325. He can’t believe they traveled so far and fought each other and in the end the fix had been besides him the whole time.

But that’s not what worries him.

What worries him is not knowing what he said “yes” to.

No, that’s not even it, either. What worries him is Daisy not knowing what she agreed to.

“It wasn’t just a blood transfusion,” he tells her. “It’s… connected us.”

The first time that happened, the first connection he had to the original host of the blood, he ended up carving on the walls, on the brink of madness and worse. 

Daisy fiddles in her seat, lifting her legs until she can wrap her arms around her knees.

“When I was under Hive’s control,” she says, and Coulson wonders when she stopped talking about those days as if it was her fault, but he’s glad she did. “He forced me to give him my blood, he wanted to create these mutant Inhuman babies, and he needed my genetic material for that. He wanted my blood. So of course, I gave it to him.”

“What?” Coulson makes a grimace.

“Yeah, it was pretty messed up,” Daisy says, chuckling with dark humor. “Can you imagine how that felt...offering my blood so that this monster with Ward’s face could breed mutant babies?”

“I’m sorry, I…” Coulson starts, but what could he say? That he’s sorry? Hive would have never found Daisy if Coulson hadn’t brought him to Earth, it’s as simple as that.

“What I mean is… this?” Daisy grabs his arm, right under the spot where the needle had been placed for the transfusion. “This is like the opposite of that.”

“Daisy…”

She drops her hand across the inside of Coulson’s arm, where the skin is most sensitive, until her fingers rest on his wrist.

“And it’s not like we weren’t connected before, right?” she says. Her voice is tiny, almost shy.

But she’s put a finger on another problem.

“That’s another thing that scares me…” Coulson confesses.

He and Daisy have always been bound to each other by stranger forces. What if he has made everything worse by agreeing to this?

“I love you,” she says, and Coulson thinks no one has ever said those to him like this, raw and honest; no one since his mom or his first girlfriend anyway. “Giving part of me to save your life? To keep you here? Of course I don’t regret it.”

“Thank you.”

“I meant what I said, you gave me everything,” Daisy tells him. Then she smiles, shyly, but it’s really beautiful here in the middle of the night, this half-light Coulson is not sure where is coming from. “You’re entitled to a bit of my blood.”

She slips her hand over Coulson’s and gives it a squeeze, like she thinks he needs a bit of encouragement.

No, he thinks.

What he needs is a bit of courage.

“I love you, too,” he says, because he wouldn’t let Daisy’s word go unrequited, or leave something so important unsaid.

Maybe that’s the good thing about not dying. Nothing is definitive now. He can always fix it, or change his mind. It used to scare him, not knowing the exact words that bound him and Daisy together. But it’s okay if love is ambiguous enough. There’s time to change what it means, if it doesn’t fit.

The other good thing about not dying is he gets to see Daisy’s smile in the darkness right now.

She pats his hand.

“Okay,” she says softly, to that darkness, to herself, more than to Coulson.

She lets go of Coulson’s hand, leaning back a bit from where she is sitting.

Coulson wonders why they haven’t switched on the lights at all, why they are talking (touching, saying I love yous) in the dark. For a moment he struggles to remember they are not alone in this half-abandoned base. Not alone in the world, either.

He wonders if that’s Daisy’s blood as well. If everything that has happened tonight — and their strange, strangely honest conversation — has been by design.

Coulson drinks from his bottle, hoping a prosaic gesture would make him feel a little less like he’s under some sort of enchantment in a fairy tale.

“And you?” Daisy asks, all of the sudden.

“What?”

“Having second thoughts? It’s as you said, it’s not just a blood transfusion. I do worry about that at least, about you. I’m Inhuman, we were both saved with Kree blood. Who knows what the ramifications of that are.”

Coulson gives her a knowing smile.

“Judging by our track record… the consequences will probably be terrible and unexpected,” he only-half jokes.

Daisy chuckles, nodding and taking a sip from her beer as well. Yeah, they have exactly that much bad luck. But Coulson feels almost excited about it, or at least excited to be facing whatever it is besides Daisy.

He thinks about how he almost threw it all again.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“What for?”

“Giving up so easily,” he says. “Forcing you to save me.”

“You’ve saved me enough times,” Daisy tells him, shrugging ever so slightly. “Who put the GH-325 inside me in the first place?”

“Another decision I made without thinking of the consequences,” Coulson reminds her. “And _there were_ consequences.”

“The consequence was that I’m still here today, and I’m grateful for that,” she tells him. There is something uncomplicated about the way she says it, something that gives Coulson hope about himself. She reaches between them and touches Coulson’s hand again. “And maybe I’m selfish but I’m grateful that you’re here too.”

And maybe it’s as uncomplicated as that, Coulson realizes. Daisy wants him here; everything else feels irrelevant for a moment. Daisy seldom gets to be selfish, even if Daisy’s version of being selfish focuses on another person, because of course it does.

“And hey’ it doesn’t have to be a bad thing, that we’re connected, right?” she says.

“Well—“

Daisy stops him from finishing that thought, moving her hand up his arm, tracing the inside of his arm, her index drawing the line of a vein.

She is not making a point with the touch; it’s a caress.

“Can you feel it? Me inside you?” she asks, her voice sounding dreamy and faraway. “I like to think you can feel it.”

The touch is almost sensual, in a way that makes Coulson wonder what she means by it. What she means by her question. She’s not scared of it. She’s not scared of the answer. Daisy is fearless. 

He can’t lie in the face of such fearlessness.

“I feel it,” he tells her.

It’s in his blood.

He can tell.

Daisy nods, resting her warm hand there, in the crook of his elbow, looking old and patient, like she can tell Coulson is afraid of putting this into words.

This.

New and maybe not.

Coulson knows he feels something has changed.

And maybe what he feels is this new _thing_ between them. The unintended consequences of a rash decision.

Maybe he is imagining things already.

Or maybe...maybe it’s a third option.


End file.
